Just Added: 1955 JIFL Semi-Final

The name JIFL is used in the subject line because it is the acronym to the name used in the two game summaries that have been added to the IJFL page above. As mentioned previously, the league was referred to by several different names during its run.

One recap is for a mid-season game in which the West End Cobras upended St. Anthony's, the other is for the titular semi-final contest between St. Anthony's and the Hull Tigers. 

The latter game was accompanied by the image below rather than an in-game action shot.

Note that the league is again referred to by a different name in the caption. This lack of consistency did not make research any easier.

For those who may be unaware, Bruce Hamilton would later be the founder and first head coach of the Ottawa Sooners football club and enter the Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame in 1996 as a builder. There aren't a lot of photographs of those junior teams in papers from that era so coming across a good shot of Mr. Hamilton was a pleasant surprise.

The OHJFL Mid-Season Reboot

In a recent post about the origins of the Ottawa Rough Riders name, I mentioned that an interesting aspect to researching the early, formative years of this sport is how often you come across commonly-believed information that turns out to be false. Another is the weird scenarios that have presented themselves as the sport and its various levels of play have grown.

They may not have appeared odd that the time but certainly do by today's standards. In some cases, the casualness with which these events were reported make them even funnier. For example, I am referring to events such as (but not limited to)...

• The 1952 pro football draft taking several months to complete.
• The 1934 Rangers earning a league championship basically on the strength on one win.
• And even more recently, the Gee-Gee managing to have -2 points in the standings and evening that out with consecutive tie games, both against the same team, no less.

I stumbled into another last night. Recording scores is all fine and good but rather dry. For all leagues and levels, I want to be able to include more game summaries and images to make those pages more interesting.

I attempted to find some for the local junior league that started in 1952. Its details are listed under the IJFL page above but it changed names multiples times. In 1952 it was simply the Ottawa-Hull Junior Football League.

In the process of failing miserably to find summaries that were more than three paragraphs long, I located the reason why the game results I'd found in old newspapers and the official standings did not match. This had been bugging me for some time.

The league launched at the end of August that year and each team had played about four games until on September 25th... 

Just like that, the league decided to dump those completed games and start clean.

The full reason is not fleshed out but I suspect affiliation with the CRU required certain adjustments that the league preferred to make immediately. Perhaps its current rosters were not in line with CRU rules, who knows?

But if the 1952 portion of the IJFL page looks like a muddled mess, it happens to be reflective of the league at that point. Coverage of it was poor at the best of times, but the league didn't help its own cause by playing games late on weeknights. I suspect final scores were achieved too late to make the next day's morning edition and not important enough to report the day after.

Still, the Citizen saw fit to provide a team picture of its inaugural season champions so there's that. Coverage would improve once the league stabilized. 

The Red Feather Tournament(s)

I was in the process of gathering results from Ottawa Tech's 1957 championship season (successfully, I might add) when I happened across the image below. 

That's a rather rare look at players from those junior teams of the time, taken from the September 27th, 1957, Ottawa Journal. Though you probably could not tell with great certainty based on the jerseys, Monk was also a St Anthony's player.  

It was the mention of the Red Feather Tournament that I found intriguing so I did a quick search. It first came about in 1949 but as a high school football showcase and charity fundraiser held in Toronto. Ottawa Tech was, coincidentally enough, the city's first representative in the tournament. 

October 21st, 1949, Ottawa Citizen, written by Bob Abra

Ottawa Tech scored a 9-0 victory over their Humberside opponent and yet...The trophy was awarded the East York Goliaths team on the strength of a scoreless tie against Hamilton earlier in the tourney. 😕

October 24th, 1949, Ottawa Citizen

Wow. Even understanding that this was supposed to be a fun event to raise funds for charity, imagine telling the kids with the only convincing win in the tournament that the trophy is being given to a team that didn't even win its contest?

Back to the photograph of the JIFL players at the top of the post, at this point I don't know if the Red Feather Tournament became one involving junior teams or if the junior circuit adopted the same name for an event of their own (I suspect the latter) but it's probably going to be part of the weekend reading/research.

The 1958 St. Anthony Rough Riders

The St. Anthony's junior football club was quite successful in the 1950s, albeit playing in a very small local league with only two or three other teams. They were ridiculously dominant in 1957 in particular, going 7-0 and scoring 352 points while allowing only 15.

The league in which they played, the Junior Interprovincial Football League, ceased operation following that season. A similar, three-team league emerged in 1959 but it did not include St. Anthony's. The following year, the Ottawa Sooners joined up and have cemented their place in Ottawa's football landscape since.

While filling out the Sooners history page, I came across an article which mentioned that the Sooners were a retooled version of the St. Anthony Saints. I had never heard that before so it was time to go fact hunting. 

St. Anthony did continue to play in 1958, just in a different format.  

St. Anthony became directly affiliated with the Ottawa Rough Riders in a program similar to a farm system in hockey, playing the other Big Four affiliates. They achieved limited success, however, posting a 2-4 record. 

Sep  6th: St. Anthony's 07 @ Brantford Tiger-Cats 14   L

Sep 13th: East York Argonauts 27 @ St. Anthony's 13    L

Sep 20th: Lakeshore Alouettes 00 @ St. Anthony's 27    W

Sep 27th: St. Anthony's 07 @ Lakeshore Alouettes 22    L

Oct  4th: St. Anthony's 11 @ East York Argos 33        L

Oct 11th: Brantford Tiger-Cats 00 @ St. Anthony's 13   W

The image below is from the September 15th Ottawa Journal and the only one I recall coming across in St. Anthony game recaps for that year. 

The article below is, as you'll see, for the game played the following week in which they dominated the league's Montreal entry.

The season was difficult financially, however, and caused the Saints (or Rough Riders, I guess) to bow out in 1959. The professional version of the Rough Riders started a relationship with a team in Cornwall instead as St. Anthony's closed up shop, football-wise.

The Sooners then showed up as a new entry into a local intermediate league in 1960 and have been hanging around for the past 60 years.

I have not been able to find a direct link between the Saints and Sooners aside from Bruce Hamilton and Don Holtby being heavily involved with both clubs. Being that Hamilton is recognized as the founder of the Sooners, however, and not St. Anthony's, it's difficult to think of the Sooners as the continuation of a prior club. 

Just added: 1953 IJFL Championship Game Recap

The Interprovincial Junior Football League has its own page above and the following article from the November 2nd Ottawa Journal was added to it a few minutes ago.

The Citizen's recap is a bit more detailed, adding that the Don Spencer touchdown was a seven-yard plunge, Barry Craig's went for five yards around the end and Jim Hunter's pass to Brian Armstrong was a 25-yard connection. Armstrong's second score was "on a similar play".